GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
GeForce GTX 470		2937 points
	Difference: 303 (10%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 should perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 26080 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be much (more or less 107%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36408 (107%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1320 (5%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.